Cemetery Road

by Greg Iles

  “Dad, for God’s sake—”

  “I talked to your mother about this before she passed.”

  Paul blanched. “You didn’t.”

  “Had to, son. Sally saw a lot, and I wondered if she’d suspected anything. Turns out she did. She’d been worried about Jet leaving for a long time. She’d even talked to her about it, like women do. What she found out, I can hardly bear to tell you. But you have to know. Because who knows what they might be planning now? Look what they did to me. They’re desperate now. They’ve got to be worried I’m going to tell you everything.”

  “Are you telling me this has something to do with Mom killing herself?”

  Max gave a somber nod. “No doubt about it. Your mother was already depressed about her illness. I didn’t know she was sick, but I knew Sally. She dreaded any affliction like that. But this affair with Marshall . . . she worried it would drive you to suicide. She didn’t know you like I do, Paul. I know you’re going to do what’s necessary, after we talk. This is why I had to tell the cops that bullshit story about Margaret Sullivan. I didn’t dare tell them what really pushed your mother to the edge.”

  “Mama thought I’d kill myself over Jet having an affair?”

  “No, no, hell no. Listen, son. You’ve got to steel yourself for this. It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever have to face in your life.”

  Paul had no idea what could push his father into this kind of mood. “I’m ready. What is it?”

  “Kevin isn’t your son. Not biologically.”

  A flash of heat crossed Paul’s face.

  “Did you hear me?” his father asked.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Not according to your wife.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Jet told Sally that she slept with Marshall back in 2005. When his Afghanistan book came out. He stopped in Jackson on his book tour. Marshall’s wife had just had their kid. She wasn’t on tour with him. Jet went to his hotel. Six weeks later she realized she was pregnant. Your mother told me you and Jet had been trying for a long time to have a kid, with no luck. Well, she popped Marshall during that stop in Jackson, and that was it. He planted one in her. That’s Kevin, as much as I hate to admit it.”

  Paul got up off the chair, then fought to keep his balance. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “I know you don’t. But you have to. Because you have to be smart from now on.”

  Paul hated the way his father talked to him. Smart from now on . . . like he’d been stupid all his life up to now. Paul folded his arms across his chest to keep from punching something. “That lick to your head scrambled your brains, Pop. Kevin looks like me. Like us. Like our side of the family. Everybody says that.”

  Max nodded. “We see what we want to see. And other people tell us what they think we want to hear.”

  “Are you saying other people know about this? Or suspect it?”

  “No. Just that seeing a resemblance is subjective. Next time you look at Kevin, you’re going to see Marshall in his face. So get ready for it.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Max sighed, then gingerly rubbed the bandage on his head. “I know this is tough. But you have to face it squarely. Can you swear to me you’ve never had a funny feeling about Kevin? A distance? A feeling that maybe he wasn’t quite yours?”

  Paul closed his eyes. He couldn’t let those thoughts in. If he did, he wouldn’t be able to hold himself upright.

  “Listen to me, Paul, like you’ve never listened in your life. Jet’s a lawyer, and she’s been thinking about this for a long time. Marshall’s no dummy, either. They’ve got a plan, I guarantee it. She wants to divorce you, go back to Washington with Marshall, and marry him. And she means to take Kevin with her.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “She told me herself last night, right before she hit me with that goddamn hammer. What she didn’t tell me, Marshall did.”

  “When? Last night?”

  “Yes, but I went to see him the other night, too. I showed him the video. Tried to scare him away from her.”

  Paul could barely contain his fury, but at the root of it was shame. How could all this be happening without him even suspecting it? “Why didn’t you tell me, Pop? Why did you waste all this time?”

  His father looked at him with more empathy than Paul could ever remember seeing in his face. “I never wanted you to have to know this, son. I wanted to handle it for you. Protect you. You don’t deserve what they’ve done to you. It would be tough for any man to handle. And you haven’t had the easiest time these past years.”

  Paul felt his balance going. “So what the hell were you doing out on that hill last night?”

  “I asked them both to meet me out there. I didn’t want anybody seeing us together. I told them they were crazy and had to end it. I told them that if they kept on, things would end badly for them, but Kevin would go through hell, too. Marshall wouldn’t listen. He and I got into it. I was getting the best of him, but Jet went to my truck and got my hammer. She would have killed me if Marshall hadn’t stopped her. But they sure didn’t mind leaving me out there to die of exposure.”

  “I’m going to take Kevin from her,” Paul heard himself say. “She’s never going to see him again.”

  “I know that’s your first instinct—”

  “First instinct! What else would I do?”

  “Think, that’s what. Kevin’s very existence is proof that Jet committed adultery. But follow that string out a little. Say you get a DNA test proving Kevin was fathered by Marshall. The endpoint of that may be divorce, but not divorce with you getting custody. Because the god-awful truth is that Kevin is Marshall’s son. You ain’t gonna wind up with him. He’ll be lost to us forever if you go that route.”

  “Surely not in Bienville,” Paul argued. “What good is all the power your damn club has if it can’t get a judge to give me custody of Kevin?”

  “Ordinarily, I’d agree. But this paternity problem can’t be got around. Blood outweighs everything else. Now, there’s ways around it, of course. But they’re not legal.”

  “Like?”

  Paul saw a familiar light in his father’s eyes. “Plant a pound of cocaine in Marshall’s house. I’ve already broken in there once, just to take a look.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sure. But the thing is, that won’t shut him up. He could still talk from prison. And Jet could still take Kevin away from you.”

  “Then what? I know you. I know this is leading to something.”

  Max ground his jaw as if in pain, then spoke in a voice devoid of all emotion. “There’s only one answer to this, son. Something’s got to happen that leaves only one parent alive. You. Then there’s no doubt whatever. You’d have custody forever, and no one would ever ask for a DNA test. Why would they? Nobody alive would even suspect the truth.”

  “You’re talking about murder.”

  His father shrugged. “I’m taking about justice. I’m talking about a woman taking another man into her bed and wrecking a marriage. A man whose life you saved in wartime, who then turned around and betrayed you when you were at your lowest point.”

  Paul could hardly make himself believe that Jet and Marshall were capable of that level of betrayal. “They told you they mean to leave and take Kevin?”

  “Paul, you’re nothing to them but an obstacle to be gotten around.”

  Paul leaned over and took hold of the bed frame with his left hand. He was afraid he might throw up.

  “I told you I went in his house,” Max said. “Look what I found.”

  Max reached into a slot in his cell phone case and brought out a folded piece of ruled notebook paper. Paul took it from his father with quivering hands and unfolded it. What he saw was the intricate pencil doodle of a talented junior high school girl, the kind of thing Jet would spend most of an hour on during history class. He knew Jet had drawn it, because of the Arabic flourishes around the letters, which made the whole thing loo
k like some sultan’s ceiling in an Ottoman palace. The shading variations alone looked like the work of a professional artist. All this Paul registered in the time it took to draw a breath. But what lasted longer, what burned itself into his brain and heart, were the letters at the center of the design: Jordan McEwan. Contained in those two words was the dream of young Jordan Elat Talal, who would years later become Jet Matheson. Scrawled across the bottom of the intricate design were more words, much smaller, yet even more painful, because they were obviously more recent. Written with a pen, they read: Remember this?! Prophecy after all!

  “Son?” Max said.

  A tear fell onto the paper, staining it gray. Paul had not cried in more years than he could remember, except on a couple of occasions when Kevin had made him so proud that he could not contain his emotion.

  “It’s gonna be all right,” his father said. “I know it’s bad now, but we’re gonna make it right. We just have to work it out.”

  Paul slowly folded the paper, slipped it into his pocket, and walked out of the hospital room. As he boarded the big elevator with a legless black man in a wheelchair, he realized he had ascended to a plane where earthly concerns no longer mattered. That piece of paper, combined with his memory of the lovemaking video, had wounded him in a way that blades and bullets never could. But it was his father’s revelation about Kevin’s paternity—and the obscene ongoing deception that it implied—that triggered a dark epiphany unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

  Max was right. All his life Paul had sensed some ineffable distance between himself and his son. He had never spoken of it to a soul. In fact, he’d hardly let himself dwell on the feeling long enough to analyze it. To do so would have been like walking out onto four inches of ice over a bottomless lake. But now . . . his father had dredged the unspeakable secret from that lake bottom and winched it to the surface. Paul’s new awareness blotted out all else and could be expressed in a single sentence that played over and over in his mind: I may be a fool, but you’ll die before you take my son . . .

  Chapter 50

  Death is absolute. It sweeps all before it. Death long expected arrives like the eye of a slow hurricane: days of wind, rain, and thunder—then silence. The rain will return as the storm moves through, but you won’t feel it, being numb. Once the storm passes, you won’t ever be the same. Feeling returns to a person changed.

  When a parent dies, your center of gravity is altered. Even if you lived apart from them—even if you walled yourself off from all contact—you are irrevocably lessened by their passing. Death, like gravity, respects no barriers.

  The hours since my father died have blurred into vignettes of my mother’s old friends stopping by with foil-covered casserole dishes and Mom compulsively straightening up the house. Intermittent thunder has made the house shudder, but the rain never comes. I’ve checked my iPhone at least a dozen times, but as yet I’ve received no call or text from Blake Donnelly or Arthur Pine. Perhaps my father’s death has made them reluctant to call, but I can’t imagine sentimentality getting in the way of Poker Club business—especially with their reputations and even their liberty on the line. More than once I’ve worried that they might decide to kill Beau Holland rather than force him to stand trial for Buck’s murder, then present me with a fait accompli. Claude Buckman and company are nothing if not practical.

  I took it upon myself to remove the assistive apparatus of Dad’s illness from the front room, though I could see it upset Mom to watch it packed away. She wanted it out of sight, but its removal was like an erasure of his final months in this house. During the silent caesuras between neighbors’ visits, she and I sit in the den, going through old photo albums she dug from a cabinet in the guest room. Most date to before Adam’s death. Some of the best pictures are from those rare occasions—once every year or two—that it snowed in Bienville, and we hauled pizza pans out to the Indian Village to slide down the snow-covered ceremonial mounds. In one shot, Dad, wrapped like a Sherpa, carries me up a steep mound while Adam, who looks about seven, trudges beside him like Edmund Hillary summiting Everest. No one looking at these photos would guess that this happy triumvirate would be shattered only a decade later.

  “Duncan did his best,” my mother says beside me. “He really did.”

  “I know,” I tell her, granting her this fiction.

  “I wish he could have lived to see you reopen the Watchman.”

  All I’ve done so far is pass the keys to Ben Tate, who has a skeleton staff downtown, setting up tomorrow’s edition. Ben’s more than a little pissed that I’ve restrained him from going hard after the Poker Club, and I can foresee problems in hewing to the deal I made with Buckman. But right now Ben is content to focus on the murders of Buck and Sally, as well as the imminent arrival of the Department of Archives and History archaeologists who will assess the paper mill site.

  “We’ll do it tomorrow in style,” I tell her. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to take that portrait of Dad from your bedroom and hang it in the lobby of the building.”

  This takes her by surprise, and moves her deeply. I have seen other widows become faithful tenders of their husbands’ legacies. “I think that’s a wonderful idea,” she says. To hide her tears, Mom changes the subject. “I’ve heard Buck Ferris’s memorial is tomorrow afternoon, out at the cemetery. Do you plan to go?”

  “Sure, of course. I didn’t know.”

  “I’d like to go with you. Buck did this family a great service.”

  That he did. “We’ll go together.”

  As she turns the album’s pages, I see the shining faces of people I haven’t spoken to in years. Bienville children who grew up and spread across the country, though most remained in the South. In every photograph, the kids seem oriented in relation to Adam, like bodies of lesser density finding their position in relation to a star.

  “That boy was something,” Mom says softly. “Wasn’t he?”

  “He was.”

  As she slowly turns the pages, moving through Christmas presents and Fourth of July firecrackers, I remember Tim Hayden talking to me in the little park up the street from Nadine’s bookstore. “Mom, can I ask you something personal?”

  “About your father?”

  “No, Adam.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you ever wonder if he might be gay?”

  “Adam?”

  I instantly regret the question.

  Mom lays her hands flat on the plastic-covered album pages, draws back her head, and looks at me. “What makes you ask that?”

  “I . . . never mind. I just wondered.”

  After a few moments, she smiles in a way I’ve never seen before, defenselessly, as though allowing her deepest self to become manifest on her face. “Of course he was,” she says. “Your father never knew. I don’t think Duncan could have handled it. Not back then. Although . . . for him, Adam could do no wrong. I suppose that would have tested his love.”

  “How long have you known?” I ask.

  “Oh, I suspected when he was a little boy. Never mind why. Mothers know these things, if they pay attention. They don’t always react well, of course. But they know. At least I did.”

  “Did you ever talk to anybody about it?”

  Another smile touches her mouth and eyes, this one wistful. “Jenny Anderson,” she says. “His girlfriend from junior and senior year. About ten years ago, she was in town for Christmas, and she stopped by to see me. Jenny knew. And she loved him like we did. For what he was. All he was.”

  “I must be blind,” I murmur, feeling ashamed.

  “We’re all blind about some things. Different things for each of us. That’s what makes life so hard.”

  I lean back on the sofa, and Mom lays her hand on my knee. “I’m not teasing you now, Marshall. You know who reminds me of Jenny Anderson? Nadine. That young lady has a pure heart and an old soul. I hope you’re not blind to that.”

  Before I can answer, my burner phone pings in my pocket.


  “Excuse me a sec, Mom. This is work.” I get up and take the phone out of my pocket, feeling her gaze on me as I walk to the door. Looking down at the screen, I see a text from Jet: Have to see you ASAP. I know it’s worst possible time, but this is an emergency. Things falling apart. Leaving for your house now. I’ll park in the woods till you let me know it’s ok to approach house. So sorry about your dad!

  “Is everything all right?” Mom calls.

  “Yes,” I tell her, leaning back through the wide door. “It’s just work. Would you be all right if I had to leave for about an hour?”

  She nods without speaking, but in her eyes I see the knowledge granted by her phenomenal perception. “Be careful,” she says. “That blindness we were talking about gets people hurt.”

  This is as close as she’ll ever come to warning me away from Jet.

  “I will, Mom. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Five minutes ago I watched Jet walk from the tree line to my patio for the third time this week. As she did, I thought about all that’s happened since she shed her clothes on the same walk three days ago. We live in a different world now—so different that had she stripped while making that walk today, I would have worried she’d lost her mind. As she walked, swiftly today, her gaze on the ground, I wasn’t thinking about Max, or Paul, or even my father. I was thinking about my conversation with Tallulah Williams. Oddly, I also remembered how Jet left her earrings in my bathroom two days ago, as a test. She’d wanted to know whether Nadine would find them there. A human gesture, obviously. But it bothered me more than I’d realized at the time.

  She sits before me now with a haunted face, her dark, long-fingered hands flat on the kitchen table. It’s odd to have a table between us, but today it seems appropriate. Something about this visit seems formal, even forced. I have a feeling she’s about to tell me why I feel that way.